A second attempt at a blog about... things. Punk Rock, Edmonton, Politics, Punk Rock Politics in Edmonton, Archaeology, Sports, RPGing, plus whatever elses pings off my brain when I'm in a writing mood. Elsewhere I am known as "Chunklets."

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

There's doins' a-transpirin'

The usual BBTM (Better Bloggers Than Me) crew has good, if scary and depressing, stuff about the federal Tories basically creating a slushfund for the Bush Whitehouse. Check out Cathie from Canada and Creekside, and prepare to be appalled.

No, it forbid the punishment of public employees, paid out of the public purse, who refused to do their goddamn jobs. Religious leaders who don't want to perform same-sex weddings, or any other wedding for that matter, don't have to as it stands now.

Anyway, Stanway blathers on at length on the theme of "We're dooooooooooomed", and I don't particularly feel like going over it at length, but I do want to say one thing about the whole issue. Ted Morton is in a no-lose situation here. Because his bill lost, he can now portray himself as the guy who stood up for rights of "normal" Albertans and was cruelly beaten down by the mean ol' opposition parties. What's sad about the whole thing is that are people out there who will fall for that shit.

That's appalling, particularly the amount given to people with disabilities. The main problem here is the strange notion, particularly prevalent in Alberta, that being as rich as Croesus has somehow removed any moral obligation on our part to be compassionate or generous. And of course, the situation was not helped when Klein dumped the entire provincial debt squarely onto the shoulders of the people least able to handle it.

The article's fairly depressing. What these idiots have essentially managed to do, in one fell swoop, is to do absolutely nothing, and I mean zero, for the protection of animals, to deal a nasty PR blow to legitimate animal-rights and animal protection groups (most of whom are working hard to get the guy's dog back for him), and to further fuck up the life of a completely innocent person who has enough worries as it is. Well done, assholes.

Via Sadly, No!, we have a link to a Kathleen Parker article on the whole Republican-candidate-calling-a-brown-person-a-"macaca" affair. While Parker's article is actually vaguely reasonable for a Townhall columnist, there was one passage which caught my attention:

Caradoc had some success against the Romans, fighting a guerrilla campaign for a number of years before he was betrayed by the queen of a neighbouring tribe, and arrested. Unusually, his life was spared by the emperor Claudius, and by all accounts he lived out his life with his family in Italy. He is sadly overlooked as a historical figure, with most of the credit for opposing the Romans in Britain going to Boudicca, whose revolt happened more than a decade later.

Caradoc

I would point out here that so far, the site has only been identified from aerial photographs, so hopefully they're intending to get in there and dig. Apparently, they're basing the identification of the site as Caradoc's city on toponomy and ancient records, so excavation is going to be necessary to confirm it.

This one's a bit more dubious. What they've found, in fact, is part of fairly elegant house on the Palatine Hill, in Rome. There is, so far, no evidence whatsoever that Augustus was actually born there; in fact, there is some debate over whether he was born in Rome at all (the other possibility is Velitrae). However, a house on the Palatine that survived the Great Fire of July 19, A.D. 64 and the subsequent rebuilding is in itself an interesting find, whether the future emperor was born there or not.

Lastly, in a bit of follow-up news, in an earlier "Friday Archaeology Blogging", I described the site of a purported pyramid in Bosnia as "unquestionably something, and a pretty damned impressive something at that." Not so, apparently:

"Uh, Captain, I'm picking up a warning light here. A Conservative is using disturbingly vague phrases like 'appropriate treatment'". Yeah, and we know all about what the right thinks appropriate treatment of young people is, don't we.

Ok, here's where the problems really start. Toews, being the nasty little piece of shit that he is, is attempting to paint a picture of children falling victim to a life of crime because our namby-pamby justice system can only sit back and helplessly watch while it happens. Which, of course, is bullshit (the following passage is from a document called Child Welfare 2000 on the Human Resources and Social Development Canada website):

Far more despicably, he's also implying that social workers will actually sit back, look at a case file, and say "Yeah, he's nine years old and he's dealing crack, no need to intervene here!", but that's a matter for another day. What's got Toews' knickers in a big sweaty knot has nothing to do with any inability of the courts to get at these kids, since the courts plainly can intervene. It is simply that he cannot bring criminal sanctions to bear against 10-year-old children. Back to the CBC article:

And that's what he wants inflicted on 10-year-olds. So, if you're ten, and your mother's abusive boyfriend is pimping you to his creep pedophile friends, take what comfort you can from the notion that Canada's Justice Minister wants you to face "meaningful consequences".

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

As a die-hard afficionado of cheap fantasy paperbacks (the kind that fit in your coat pocket so you can take them on the bus easily), I was dismayed to see this. While Gemmell's novels could be, sometimes, accused of being formulaic, this problem was mitigated by the fact that the formula was pretty good. And some of them, Knights of Dark Renown and Echoes of the Great Song for example, were quite original. All-in-all, Gemmell was a clear cut above most modern fantasy authors. R.I.P.